Nada is a drifter that has just come into Los Angeles looking for work. He gets a job at a construction site doing manual labor. One of the other workers, Frank (Keith David), steers him to a make shift soup kitchen and homeless encampment run by Gilbert (Peter Jason). Next to the encampment is a church. A street preacher (Raymond St. Jacques) rants in front of it. Various other homeless people have shanties in the encampment.
There is one television out in the open with a couple beat up chairs in front of it. The set runs non-stop. That night someone hacks into the television broadcast and starts talking about being in an artificially induced state of consciousness. He says the poor and the underclass are growing and that racial justice and human rights don’t exist. They intend on ruling and we are letting them. All the while the hacker is talking the street preacher, although too far away to hear him, is mouthing the words the hacker is saying. Nana sees Gilbert take the preacher away into the church.
The next day the hacker appears again for a short time and then the signal is lost. Gilbert notices the lost signal and heads for the church. Nana notices Gilbert and follows. Inside the church are people, equipment and boxes of merchandise. That night the encampment is raided and torn down. People are being beaten by police with batons. The next day Nada goes to the church. He finds a small cardboard box. He takes the box and goes into an alley to open it. Inside are a bunch of sunglasses. He takes a pair and hides the rest.
Out on the street, when he is wearing the sunglasses he can see subliminal messages everywhere. On billboards, magazines, posters, signs. Anywhere something is written, there is a message, buy more, obey, consume, reproduce. Then when he looks at people he sees that some of them are aliens. One of the aliens realizes that Nada can see her. She uses a radio in her wristwatch to notify others. Nada runs when he hears the police coming. He manages to get away by shooting a bunch of aliens and kidnapping a woman, making her drive him to her house. He finds out her name is Holly (Meg Foster). He tries to get her to see the aliens but she pushes him out the window and calls the cops.
Nada is on the run again. He ends up back at the construction site. Frank thinks Nada killed real people. It takes him quite a while and a fist fight to get Frank to see through the glasses. Now there are two of them that know about the aliens. They run into Gilbert who takes them to a meeting of others who know about the aliens. They find out where the source of the alien signal is coming from. The only way to stop the aliens is to get to the source and destroy it.
“They Live” was released in 1988 and was directed by John Carpenter. The film is based on the short story “Eight O’clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson. I like this movie. It’s fun, the aliens are creepy skull-like creatures and Carpenter’s music score is great as usual. The underlying topic is still relevant. If you like conspiracy theories about aliens taking over the world then get out your tinfoil hats. This is a good one.
The drifter is played by the wrestler “Rowdy Roddy Piper”. His character actually doesn’t have a name in the movie and no one ever calls him by anything. The name Nada, which is Spanish for nothing, is what is reflected in the movie’s credits. In the story the characters name is George Nada. The line "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum" was ad-libbed by Roddy Piper. The fight scene between Frank and Nada was only suppose to last twenty seconds but Piper and David decided to fight for real, except for face and groin shots. Carpenter was so impressed he left the entire five minute twenty second fight intact.
Some of the small characters and extras were actual homeless people. Carpenter fed them and gave them a paycheck.
Writer-director John Carpenter has said of this movie that it was a critique of Reaganomics, a "vehicle to take on Reaganism". However, over the years, several neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups co-opted the movie for their own purpose, spreading rumors that it is really an allegory for Jews controlling the world. This forced Carpenter to respond on Twitter in 2017 by stating "They Live is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie".